Wednesday, September 28, 2016

From Urban Acupuncture to the Third Generation City

Casagrande,
M. (2016). From Urban Acupuncture to the Third Generation City. Journal of

Biourbanism,
IV(1&2/2015), 29−42.

From Urban Acupuncture to

the Third Generation City

Marco Casagrande

Ruin
Academy, C-Lab, and International Society of Biourbanism, Finland

ABSTRACT

The
crisis of urbanism is analyzed as a vital phenomenon that prepares the Third
Generation City—its connection with nature and its flesh. The industrial city
is, on the contrary, fictitious. The example of the settlement of Treasure
Hill, near Taipei, is given. As an organic ruin of the industrial city,
Treasure Hill is a biourban site of resistance and an acupuncture point of
Taipei, with its own design methodology based on Local Knowledge. This ruin is
the matter from which parasite urbanism composts the modern city. Another
example is offered by observing the daily life in Mumbai’s unofficial
settlements. Urban acupuncture, the Third Generation City, and the conceptual
model of paracity speak to the community that rests in the hands of its own
people.

Missis
Chen is 84 years old. She has lived together with the Xindian River all her
life. Her family used to have a boat, like every Taipei family, and a water
buffalo. Sometimes the kids would cross the river on the back of the buffalo.
Sometimes an uncle might end up so drunk, that they hesitated, if they could
put him back on his boat after an evening together. Children, vegetables, and
laundry were washed in the river. The water was drinkable and the river was
full of fish, crabs, snails, clams, shrimp, and frogs to eat.

Missis
Chen used to work for sand harvesters, who dug sand out of the river bottom for
making concrete. She made food for them. Many of the sand harvesters lived in
the Treasure Hill settlement together with Missis Chen’s family. In the past,
the hill had been a Japanese Army anti-aircraft position, and it was rumored
that the Japanese had hidden a treasure of gold somewhere in their bunker
networks inside the hill—hence the name Treasure Hill.

Xindian
River was flooding—like all Taipei rivers—when the frequent typhoons arrived in
summers and autumns. The flood was not very high, though—the Taipei Basin is a
vast flood plain and water has plenty of space to spread out. Houses were
designed so that the knee-high flood would not come in, or in some places, the
water was let into the ground floor while people continued to live on the upper
floors. In Treasure Hill, the flood would also come into the piggeries and
other light-weight structures on the river flood bank, but the houses with
people were a bit higher up on the hill. All of the flood bank was farmed, and
the farms and vegetable gardens were constructed so that they could live
together with the flood. Flooding was normal. This pulse of nature was a source
of life.

Missis
Chen remembers when the river got polluted. “The pollution comes from
upstream,” she says, referring to the many illegal ‘Made in Taiwan’—factories
up on the mountains and river banks, which let all their industrial waste into
the river. “Now not even the dogs eat the fish anymore.” At some point, the
river became so polluted that Taipei children were taught not to touch the
water or they would go blind. The flood became poisonous for the emerging
industrial city, which could no longer live together with the river nature. The
city built a wall against the flooding river:
a 12 meters high, reinforced concrete flood wall separating the built
urban environment from nature.

“One
day, the flood came to Chiang Kai-shek’s home and the Dictator got angry. He
built the wall. We call it the Dictator’s Wall,” an elderly Jiantai fisherman
recalls sitting in his bright blue boat with a painted white eye and red mouth
and continues to tell his stories describing which fish disappeared which year,
and when some of the migrating fishes ceased to return to the river. In one
lifetime, the river has transformed from a treasure chest of seafood into an
industrial sewer, which is once again being slowly restored towards a more
natural condition. The wall hasn’t moved anywhere. The generations of Taipei
citizens born after the 1960s don’t live in a river city. They live in an
industrially-walled urban fiction separated from nature.

TREASURE HILL

In
2003, the Taipei City Government decided to destroy the unofficial settlement
of Treasure Hill. By that time, the community consisted of some 400 households
of mainly elderly Kuomintang veterans and illegal migrant workers. The
bulldozers had knocked down the first two layers of the houses of the terraced
settlement on the hillside. After that, the houses were standing too high for
the bulldozers to reach, and there were no drivable roads leading into the
organically built settlement. Then the official city destroyed the farms and
community gardens of Treasure Hill down by the Xindian River flood banks. Then
they cut the circulation between the individual houses—small bridges, steps,
stairs, and pathways. After that, Treasure Hill was left to rot, to die slowly,
cut away from its life sources.

Roan
Chin-Yueh of the WEAK! managed so that the City Government Department of
Cultural Affairs invited me to Taipei. She introduced me to Treasure Hill’s
impressive organic settlement with a self-made root-cleaning system of gray
waters through patches of jungle on the hillside. Treasure Hill was composting
organic waste into fertilizer for the farms and using minimum amounts of
electricity, which was stolen from the official grid. There was even a central
radio system through which Missis Chen could transmit important messages to the
community, such as inviting them to watch old black and white movies in the
open-air cinema in front of her house.

At
that point, the city had stopped to collect trash from Treasure Hill, and there
were lots of garbage bags in the alleys. I started to collect these garbage
bags and carried them down the hill into a pile close to a point that you could
reach with a truck. The residents did not speak to me, but instead they hid
inside their houses. One could feel their eyes on one’s back, though. Some
houses were abandoned and I entered them. The interiors and the atmospheres
were as if the owners had left all of a sudden. Even photo albums were there
and tiny altars with small gods with long beards. In one of the houses, I could
not help looking at the photo album. The small tinted black and white photos
started in mainland China, and all the guys wore Kuomintang military uniforms.
Different landscapes in different parts of China, and then at some point the
photos turned to color prints. The same guys were in Taiwan. Then there was a
woman, and an elderly gentleman posed with her in civil clothes by a fountain.
Photos of children and young people. Civil clothes, but the Kuomintang flag of
Taiwan everywhere. A similar flag was inside the room. Behind me, somebody
enters the house, which is only one room with the altar on the other end and a
bed on the other. The old man is looking at me. He is calm and observant,
somehow sad. He speaks and shows with his hand at the altar. Do not touch—I
understand. I look at the old man in the eyes and he looks into mine. I feel
like looking at the photo album. The owner of the house must have been his
friend. They have travelled together a long way from the civil war of China to
Taiwan. They have literally built their houses on top of Japanese concrete
bunkers and made their life in Treasure Hill. His friend has passed away. There
is a suitcase and I pack inside the absent owner’s trousers and his shirt, both
in khaki color. I continue collecting the garbage bags and carry the old man’s
bag around the village. The next day the residents start helping me with collecting
the garbage. Professor Kang Min-Jay organizes a truck to take the bags away.
After a couple of days, we organize a public ceremony together with some
volunteer students and Treasure Hill veterans, and declare a war on the
official city: Treasure Hill will fight
back and it is here to stay. I’m
wearing the dead man’s clothes.

We
have a long talk with Professor Roan about Treasure Hill and how to stop the
destruction. He suggests that Hsieh Ying-Chun (Atelier 3, WEAK!) will join us
with his aboriginal Thao tribe crew of self-learned construction workers. I
start touring at local universities giving speeches about the situation and try
to recruit students for construction work. In the end, we have 200 students
from Tamkang University Department of Architecture, Chinese Cultural
University, and National Taiwan University. A team of attractive girl students
manage to make a deal with the neighboring bridge construction site workers,
and they start offloading some of the construction material cargo to us from
the trucks passing us by. We mainly get timber and bamboo; they use mahogany
for the concrete molds.

With
the manpower and simple construction material, we start reconstructing the
connections between the houses of the settlement, but most importantly, we also
restart the farms. The bridge construction workers even help us with a digging
machine. Missis Chen comes to advise us about the farming and offers us food
and Chinese medicine. I am invited to her house every evening after the workday
with an interpreter. She tells her life story and I see how she is sending food
to many houses whose inhabitants are very old. Children from somewhere come to
share our dinners as well. Her house is the heart of the community. Treasure
Hill veterans join us in the farming and construction work. Rumors start
spreading in Taipei: things are cooking
in Treasure Hill. More people volunteer for the work, and after enough urban
rumors the media arrives suddenly. After the media, the politicians follow.
Commissioner Liao from the City Government Cultural Bureau comes to recite
poems. Later Mayor Ma Ying-Jeou comes jogging by with TV crews and gives us his
blessings. The City Government officially agrees that this is exactly why they
had invited me from Finland to work with the issue of Treasure Hill. The same
government had been bulldozing the settlement away 3 weeks earlier.

One
can design whole cities simply with rumors.

Working
in Treasure Hill had pressed an acupuncture point of the industrial Taipei
City. Our humble construction work was the needle that had penetrated through
the thin layer of official control and touched the original ground ofTaipei—collective topsoil where Local
Knowledge is rooting. Treasure Hill is an urban compost, which was considered a
smelly corner of the city, but after some turning is now providing the most
fertile topsoil for future development. The Taiwanese would refer to this
organic energy as “Chi.”

URBAN ACUPUNCTURE

After
the initial discovery in Treasure Hill, the research of Urban Acupuncture
continued at the Tamkang University Department of Architecture, where Chairman
Chen Cheng-Chen under my professorship added it to the curriculum in the autumn
of 2004. In 2009, the Finnish Aalto University’s Sustainable Global
Technologies research center with Professor Olli Varis joined in to further
develop the multidisciplinary working methods of Urban Acupuncture in Taipei,
with focus on urban ecological restoration through punctual interventions. In
2010, the Ruin Academy was launched in Taipei with the help of the JUT
Foundation. The Academy operated as an independent multidisciplinary research
center moving freely in between the different disciplines of art and science
within the general framework of built human environment. The focus was on Urban
Acupuncture and the theory of the Third Generation City. Ruin Academy
collaborated with the Tamkang University Department of Architecture, the
National Taiwan University Department of Sociology, Aalto University SGT, the
Taipei City Government Department of Urban Development, and the International
Society of Biourbanism.

Urban
Acupuncture is a biourban theory, which combines sociology and urban design
with the traditional Chinese medical theory of acupuncture. As a design
methodology, it is focused on tactical, small-scale interventions on the urban
fabric, aiming in ripple effects and transformation on the larger urban
organism. Through the acupuncture points, Urban Acupuncture seeks to be in
contact with the site-specific Local Knowledge. By its nature, Urban
Acupuncture is pliant, organic, and relieves stress and industrial tension in
the urban environment, thus directing the city towards the organic—urban nature
as part of nature. Urban Acupuncture produces small-scale, but ecologically and
socially catalytic development on the built human environment.

Urban
Acupuncture is not an academic innovation. It refers to common collective Local
Knowledge practices that already exist in Taipei and other cities,
self-organized practices that are tuning the industrial city towards the
organic machine—the Third Generation City.

In
Taipei, the citizens ruin the centrally governed, official mechanical city with
unofficial networks of urban farms and community gardens. They occupy streets
for night markets and second hand markets, and activate idle urban spaces for
karaoke, gambling, and collective exercises (dancing, Tai-Chi, Chi-Gong, et
cetera). They build illegal extensions to apartment buildings, and dominate the
urban no man’s land by self-organized, unofficial settlements, such as Treasure
Hill. The official city is the source of pollution, while the self-organized
activities are more humble in terms of material energy-flows and more tied with
nature through the traditions of Local Knowledge. There is a natural resistance
towards the official city. It is viewed as an abstract entity that seems to
threaten people’s sense of community, and separates them from the biological
circulations.

Urban
Acupuncture is Local Knowledge in Taipei, which on a larger scale, keeps the
official city alive. The unofficial is the biological tissue of the mechanical
city. Urban Acupuncture is a biourban healing and development process
connecting modern man with nature.

THIRD
GENERATION CITY

The
first generation city is the one where the human settlements are in straight
connection with nature and dependent on nature. The fertile and rich Taipei
Basin provided a fruitful environment for such a settlement. The rivers were
full of fish and good for transportation, with the mountains protecting the
farmed plains from the straightest hits of the frequent typhoons.

The
second generation city is the industrial city. Industrialism granted the
citizens independence from nature—a mechanical environment could provide
everything humans needed. Nature was seen as something unnecessary or as
something hostile—it was walled away from the mechanical reality.

The
Third Generation City is the organic ruin of the industrial city, an open form,
organic machine tied with Local Knowledge and self-organized community actions.
The community gardens of Taipei are fragments of third generation urbanism when
they exist together with their industrial surroundings. Local Knowledge is
present in the city, and this is where Urban Acupuncture is rooting. Among the
anarchist gardeners are the Local Knowledge professors of Taipei.

The
Third Generation City is a city of cracks. The thin mechanical surface of the
industrial city is shattered, and from these cracks emerge the new biourban
growth, which will ruin the second generation city. Human-industrial control is
opened up in order for nature to step in. A ruin is when the manmade has become
part of nature. In the Third Generation City, we aim at designing ruins. The
Third Generation City is true when the city recognizes its local knowledge and
allows itself to be part of nature.

“To find a
form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now” (Samuel
Beckett).

PARASITE
URBANISM

The
emerging biourban cities are not homogeneous platforms for single cultures,
races, economical doctrines, timelines, or other ways of life or being. They
are urban composts where organic knowledge is floating into the cracks of the
industrially developed surroundings. This organic knowledge has the ability to treat
and heal the surrounding city as a positive parasite. It can suck in and treat
urban and even industrial waste, and it is able to build bridges between the
modern man and nature. It can grow to places where the industrial city cannot
go and through punctual interventions, it can tune the whole urban development
towards the organic; built human nature as part of nature.

This
symbiotic coexistence between the “official” and “developed” city, and the
unofficial, self-built and organic parasite biourbanism has been existing
already for a long time with slums, favelas, camps of migrating workers,
unofficial settlements, urban enclaves of resistance, community gardens and
urban farms, and even refugee camps. These strongholds of urban nomads are
harvesting the surrounding city from what it calls waste, surplus material
streams of the industrial life. Without these urban nomads, these material
streams will end up in nature as what we call pollution. The unofficial is the
buffer zone between development and nature—trying to save the city from itself.

This
parasite urbanism should be encouraged to grow on the expense of industrial
efficiency. It should eat the urban industrialism away up until a point, where
the city is in tune with the life-providing systems of nature. Within this new
biourban human mangrove, the relicts of the industrial hardness will emerge as
islands, ridges or hills, maybe volcanoes. This urban compost is the Third
Generation City. It already exists in many places and on many scales, from
Jakarta to Rio, and from the collective urban farms of Taipei to the buffalo
sheds of Mumbai. It is not a utopia, but a way in which the different material
cycles of cities have coexisted for much longer than industrialism.

For
example, in Mumbai there have always been countless buffalo sheds along the
monsoon floodwater streams. The respected animal gives fuel (dung-cakes) and
milk to the surrounding city. Here, the river or stream is an essential part of
this symbiosis. The buffalo dung is pushed to the low water stream, where women
mix it by foot with straw before it gets transported back to the sheds for the
making and drying of the dung-cakes. The buffaloes also need to get washed
every day. The buffalo caretakers are living on decks above the animals.

People
have always brought their household waste from the surrounding city to the
buffalo sheds in exchange for the milk and energy. The first one to eat from
this organic waste is the buffalo, which will pick up the best parts. Then
comes the goat, which can even eat paper. After the goat comes the dog, who
goes through the possible small remnants of bones, skins, and meat. The last
one in the chain is the pig, who will eat even rotten meat and already digested
material. The surrounding city cannot live without the buffalo sheds. This
chain of animals worked perfectly before the age of industrial materials. Then,
materials started to appear in the trash bags that even a pig could not
consume—plastics, aluminum, et cetera. The city needed a new animal: man.

The
slums of Mumbai have grown around the buffalo sheds. Millions of people have
been transported from the poorest areas of India to take care of the developed
city. Only in the Owhiwara River chain of slums is there estimated to live some
700,000 inhabitants. The recycling stations and illegal factories are situated
here, just next door to Bollywood. What cannot be recycled or treated ends up
in the river, just like in Jakarta it ends up in the bay. Monsoon will flush
the toilet.

The
buffalo sheds are the original acupuncture needles of Mumbai. Now, together
with slums, they present a strong culture of parasite urbanism. The harvesting,
processing, and recycling of the urban waste is harmful for the people who do
it and for nature. The Third Generation City is looking towards a situation where
the parasite urbanism has reached another level presenting a biourban balance
between the rivers, slums, and the surrounding city.

PARACITY

Learning
from the cases of Taipei and Mumbai, we have developed a conceptual model to
further study the possibilities of parasite urbanism: Paracity (2014).

Paracity
is a biourban organism that is growing on the principles of Open Form: individual design-built actions generating
spontaneous communicative reactions on the surrounding built human environment.
This organic constructivist dialogue leads to self-organized community
structures, sustainable development, and knowledge building. Open Form is close
to the original Taiwanese ways of developing the self-organized and often
“illegal” communities. These micro-urban settlements contain a high volume of
Local Knowledge, which we believe will start composting in Paracity, once the
development of the community is in the hands of the citizens.

The
agritectural organism of the Paracity is based on a primary wooden
three-dimensional structure, an organic grid with spatial modules of 6 x 6 x 6
meters, constructed out of CLT (cross-laminated timber) beams, and columns.
This simple structure can be modified and developed by the community members.
The primary structure can grow even in neglected urban areas such as flood
plains, hillsides, abandoned industrial areas, storm water channels, and slums.
Paracity is perfectly suited for flooding and tsunami risk areas and the CLT
primary structure is highly fire-resistant and capable of withstanding
earthquakes.

Paracity
provides the skeleton, but the citizens create the flesh. Design should not
replace reality—Flesh is More. Paracitizens will attach their individual,
self-made architectural solutions, gardens, and farms on the primary structure,
which will offer a three- dimensional building grid for DIY architecture. The
primary structure also provides the main arteries of water and human
circulation, but the finer Local Knowledge nervous networks are weaved in by
the inhabitants. Large parts of Paracity is occupied by wild and cultivated
nature following the example of Treasure Hill and other unofficial communities in
Taipei.

Paracity’s
self-sustainable biourban growth is backed up by off-the-grid modular
environmental technology solutions, providing methods for water purification,
energy production, organic waste treatment, waste water purification, and
sludge recycling. These modular plug-in components can be adjusted according to
the growth of the Paracity, and moreover, the whole Paracity is designed not
only to treat and circulate its own material streams, but to start leeching
waste from its host city and thus becoming a positive urban parasite following
the similar kinds of symbiosis as in-between slums and the surrounding city. In
a sense, Paracity is a high-tech slum, which can start tuning the industrial
city towards an ecologically more sustainable direction. Paracity is a Third
Generation City, an organic machine urban compost, which assists the industrial
city to transform itself into being part of nature.

The
pilot project of the Paracity grows on an urban farming island of Danshui
River, Taipei City. The island is located between the Zhongxing and Zhonxiao
bridges and is around 1,000 meters long and 300 meters wide. Paracity Taipei
celebrates the original first generation Taipei urbanism with a high level of
“illegal” architecture, self-organized communities, urban farms, community
gardens, urban nomads, and constructive anarchy.

After
the Paracity has reached critical mass, the life-providing system of the CLT
structure will start escalating. It will cross the river and start taking root
on the flood plains. It will then cross the 12 meters high Taipei flood wall
and gradually grow into the city. The flood wall will remain in the guts of the
Paracity, but the new structure enables Taipei citizens to fluently reach the
river. Paracity will reunite the river reality and the industrial urban
fiction. Paracity is a mediator between the modern city and nature. Seeds of
the Paracity will start taking root within the urban acupuncture points of
Taipei: illegal community gardens, urban
farms, abandoned cemeteries, and wastelands. From these acupuncture points,
Paracity will start growing by following the covered irrigation systems such as
the Liukong Channel, and eventually the biourban organism and the static city
will find a balance—the Third Generation Taipei.

Paracity
has a lot of holes, gaps, and nature between houses. This is a city of cracks.
The system ventilates itself like a large-scale beehive of post-industrial
insects. The different temperatures of the roofs, gardens, bodies of water and
shaded platforms will generate small winds between them, and the hot roofs will
start sucking in breeze from the cooler river. The individual houses should
also follow the traditional principles of bioclimatic architecture and not rely
on mechanical air-conditioning.

The
biourbanism of the Paracity is as much landscape as it is architecture. The
all-encompassing landscape-architecture of Paracity includes organic layers for
natural water purification and treatment, community gardening, farming, and
biomass production as an energy source. Infrastructure and irrigation water
originates from the polluted Danshui River and will be both chemically
(bacteria-based) and biologically purified before being used in the farms,
gardens, and the houses of the community. The bacteria/chemically purified
water gets pumped up to the roof parks on the top level of the Paracity, from
where it will by gravity start circulating into the three-dimensional irrigation
systems.

Paracity
is based on free flooding. The whole city stands on stilts, allowing the river
to pulsate freely with the frequent typhoons and storm waters. The Paracity is
actually an organic architectural flood itself, ready to cross the flood wall
of Taipei and spread into the mechanical city.

Paracity
Taipei will be powered mostly by bioenergy that uses the organic waste,
including sludge, taken from the surrounding industrial city and by farming
fast-growing biomass on the flood banks of the Taipei river system. Paracity
Taipei will construct itself through impacts of collective consciousness, and
it is estimated to have 15,000–25,000 inhabitants.

The
wooden primary structure and the environmental technology solutions will remain
pretty much the same no matter in which culture the Paracity starts to grow,
but the real human layer of self-made architecture and farming will follow the
Local Knowledge of the respective culture and site. Paracity is always
site-specific and it is always local. Other Paracities are emerging in North
Fukushima in Japan and the Baluchistan Coast in Pakistan.

CONCLUSION

The
way towards the Third Generation City is a process of becoming a collective
learning and healing organism and of reconnecting the urbanized collective
consciousness with nature. In Taipei, the wall between the city and the river
must go. This requires a total transformation from the city infrastructure and
from the centralized power control. Otherwise, the real development will be
unofficial. Citizens on their behalf are ready and are already breaking the
industrial city apart by themselves. Local knowledge is operating independently
from the official city and is providing punctual third generation surroundings
within the industrial city: urban
acupuncture for the stiff official mechanism.

The
weak signals of the unofficial collective consciousness should be recognized as
the futures’ emerging issues; futures that are already present in Taipei. The
official city should learn how to enjoy acupuncture, how to give up industrial
control in order to let nature step in.

The
Local Knowledge-based transformation layer of Taipei is happening from inside
the city, and it is happening through self-organized punctual interventions.
These interventions are driven by small-scale businesses and alternative
economies benefiting from the fertile land of the Taipei Basin, and of leeching
the material and energy streams of the official city. This acupuncture makes
the city weaker, softer, and readier for a larger change.

The
city is a manifest of human-centered systems—economical, industrial,
philosophical, political, and religious power structures. Biourbanism is an
animist system regulated by nature. Human nature as part of nature, also within
the urban conditions. The era of pollution is the era of industrial urbanism.
The next era has always been within the industrial city. The first generation
city never died. The seeds of the Third Generation City are present.
Architecture is not an art of human control; it is an art of reality. There is
no other reality than nature.